If you've been following the story of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and Edward Snowden, this tweet will need to explanation and you will gasp in astonishment.

But if you haven't been following it, let me back up and explain.

First, there have always been a lot of discrepancies in the story of how these adversarial journalists met Snowden, the accounts of the first time they heard from him online and made contact with him via encrypted email, and the dates of when they met him in person. (Edward Jay Epstein is among those who have asked a lot of questions about how much help Snowden had in arranging and paying for this complicated venture.)

The story is now iconic about how the journalists arranged a signal with Snowden through their encrypted chat that would enable them to recognize him when they met him in person - it was how they would know it was really him. Poitras mentions it in her interview with Peter Maass; it's also in Greenwald's interview with Haaretz.

Snowden said he would be carrying a Rubik's cube, and they should ask loudly whether a restaurant at his hotel in Hong Kong was open, and Snowden would reply that the food was lousy.

And on the actual day -- the date of which seems difficult to pin down from the public sources -- they were too early, as Snowden later complained in an interview, and it was frustrating. But eventually they got the signals matched and went to his hotel room, where Poitras got out her camera, and Greenwald began taking his deposition like a lawyer, as he described it.

What if the sure-fire way they decided to make the meet-up was not by risking even crypted email or chat, but by having a cutout? Someone whose Twitter stream they could all tune into if they already followed her or even just by using search and thus not leave a trace as they picked up the cue, and then knew that it was time to put the plan in action. Or another variation -- someone whose Twitter timeline could be referenced as a back-up if there was a screw-up, to make the plan still work if it failed the first time (which apparently it did).

Could Appelbaum have asked her to arrange the signal? Was he the one communicating with Snowden directly because he found it easy to use the tools, and Glenn didn't? Originally, they all worked together, even if this relationship was very frayed by the time Appelbaum began accusing Greenwald and others of "sitting on" the Snowden documents for fear of government reprisals.

Appelbaum was so concerned about the eyebrows that would be raised about this obvious coincidence -- especially given questions people began to ask early about whether the journalists had guided Snowden's hacks - that in a videotaped keynote speech at a conference in Berlin, he pre-emptively made an alibi about celebrating his birthday in Hawaii in April, a long time dream. This was noticed and blogged by @LibertyLynx on Twitter and @StreetwiseProf.

Except, his alibi speech only raised more questions than it answered, because he didn't mention the Spring Break of Code at all at the same time, even though he was obviously socializing with its participants as Corbett's picture illustrates.

When it was noted that Snowden has Electronic Frontier Foundation stickers on his laptop -- and another sticker from Tor, even geekier -- this coincidence, too, is explained away and questioners ridiculed. John Perry Barlow, founder of both EFF and the Foundation for a Free Press, which has been funding WikiLeaks and Snowden, was among the first to tweet about he picture in the Guardian taken by Poitras with the stickers. EFF made several nervous pre-emptive interviews about this coincidence as well. Although they didn't concede it, it's more than likely that Greenwald or Poitras gave the stickers to him -- or perhaps he even did get them at a meeting with hackers before his officially-acknowledged first meting in Hong Kong.

But the Rubik's cube tweet is harder to explain away.

To be sure, geeks like Rubik cubes and maybe a geek girl's idea of a party is a Rubik cube theme.

I've sent a query to Corbett but I haven't heard back.

Perhaps proof of its innocence is the fact that it wasn't deleted immediately after the meeting with Snowden -- or perhaps the way to ensure it would always remain ambiguous would be not to delete it so it would never look like anything but a party theme.

If you've been following the story of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and Edward Snowden, this tweet will need to explanation and you will gasp in astonishment.

But if you haven't been following it, let me back up and explain.

First, there have always been a lot of discrepancies in the story of how these adversarial journalists met Snowden, the accounts of the first time they heard from him online and made contact with him via encrypted email, and the dates of when they met him in person. (Edward Jay Epstein is among those who have asked a lot of questions about how much help Snowden had in arranging and paying for this complicated venture.)

The story is now iconic about how the journalists arranged a signal with Snowden through their encrypted chat that would enable them to recognize him when they met him in person - it was how they would know it was really him. Poitras mentions it in her interview with Peter Maass; it's also in Greenwald's interview with Haaretz.

Snowden said he would be carrying a Rubik's cube, and they should ask loudly whether a restaurant at his hotel in Hong Kong was open, and Snowden would reply that the food was lousy.

And on the actual day -- the date of which seems difficult to pin down from the public sources -- they were too early, as Snowden later complained in an interview, and it was frustrating. But eventually they got the signals matched and went to his hotel room, where Poitras got out her camera, and Greenwald began taking his deposition like a lawyer, as he described it.

What if the sure-fire way they decided to make the meet-up was not by risking even crypted email or chat, but by having a cutout? Someone whose Twitter stream they could all tune into if they already followed her or even just by using search and thus not leave a trace as they picked up the cue, and then knew that it was time to put the plan in action. Or another variation -- someone whose Twitter timeline could be referenced as a back-up if there was a screw-up, to make the plan still work if it failed the first time (which apparently it did).

Could Appelbaum have asked her to arrange the signal? Was he the one communicating with Snowden directly because he found it easy to use the tools, and Glenn didn't? Originally, they all worked together, even if this relationship was very frayed by the time Appelbaum began accusing Greenwald and others of "sitting on" the Snowden documents for fear of government reprisals.

Appelbaum was so concerned about the eyebrows that would be raised about this obvious coincidence -- especially given questions people began to ask early about whether the journalists had guided Snowden's hacks - that in a videotaped keynote speech at a conference in Berlin, he pre-emptively made an alibi about celebrating his birthday in Hawaii in April, a long time dream. This was noticed and blogged by @LibertyLynx on Twitter and @StreetwiseProf.

Except, his alibi speech only raised more questions than it answered, because he didn't mention the Spring Break of Code at all at the same time, even though he was obviously socializing with its participants as Corbett's picture illustrates.

When it was noted that Snowden has Electronic Frontier Foundation stickers on his laptop -- and another sticker from Tor, even geekier -- this coincidence, too, is explained away and questioners ridiculed. John Perry Barlow, founder of both EFF and the Foundation for a Free Press, which has been funding WikiLeaks and Snowden, was among the first to tweet about he picture in the Guardian taken by Poitras with the stickers. EFF made several nervous pre-emptive interviews about this coincidence as well. Although they didn't concede it, it's more than likely that Greenwald or Poitras gave the stickers to him -- or perhaps he even did get them at a meeting with hackers before his officially-acknowledged first meting in Hong Kong.

But the Rubik's cube tweet is harder to explain away.

To be sure, geeks like Rubik cubes and maybe a geek girl's idea of a party is a Rubik cube theme.

I've sent a query to Corbett but I haven't heard back.

Perhaps proof of its innocence is the fact that it wasn't deleted immediately after the meeting with Snowden -- or perhaps the way to ensure it would always remain ambiguous would be not to delete it so it would never look like anything but a party theme.